An iTunes for Choosing Charities

Imagine this. You log onto Everycharity.org (or whatever it ends up being called). A website opens: Instead of looking like it was designed by PhD candidates in MIT’s accounting program, it’s as visually seductive and appealing as iTunes. Instead of reading like it was written by a committee of academics, it’s as easy to understand as Mr. Rogers. Instead of acronyms and social service jargon, there are real words giving you real information. In every way and at every level, it’s the opposite of what you expected. Instead of intimidating you, it invites you. Instead of frustrating you, it inspires you. Instead of disappointing you, it fills you with a sense of possibility.

On the home page, there’s a giant heart where you type in the name of the charity you want to learn about. It’s a relatively new organization. You’re expecting an error message: “Not found. DGGTY667524. You must re-try your search.” But it’s actually there! A video pops up with a great big “play” button. You click to watch the executive director of the charity talk for five minutes about the organization’s goals, the progress it’s making — or not making — toward those goals, and what information the organization uses to gauge whether it’s getting results.

Don’t feel like watching the video? Just click the button that says “Dreams,” and you’ll see information about the organization’s goal for the year and its goal for the next five years. The button that says “Read client surveys” takes you to a book that you can flip through, with client ratings and comments in nice fat 18-point type. Imagine hearing about a homeless shelter from the people who actually stay there. There’s another button you can’t miss that says “Results.” Up will pop a jargon-free summary — written by real people who spent real time meeting with the organization’s staff, clients, and constituents — that describes what the organization’s been up to over the past year, what results it has achieved or tried to achieve, what its strengths are, and what its weaknesses appear to be.

Who are these people who visit the organizations, examining their goals, creating the videos, and writing the summaries? They’re highly-trained professionals, grad students, and recent college grads, all part of the Cause Corps — a kind of Peace Corps for evaluating the work of charities. It consists of thousands of super-skilled, conscientious, and objective analysts who visit each and every operating charity in America to do annual surveys. If the charity is a very small organization, Cause Corps members might spend only a day or two. For a larger organization, they might spend a week. Every active charity gets a visit — all 700,000 of them — every year. No one is left out, and every profile is fresh, up-to-date, and objective.

Why every charity? Because you simply won’t get widespread use if people know they can’t find the charity they’re looking for. Imagine if iTunes carried only the top 50 bands in America. How mainstream do you think it would be? Some people might say that only the large, established charities should be looked at. But the small upstarts might very well be doing the best work, and donors should know that.

You can find other information on the site: for instance, a user-friendly analysis of how the organization scored on an “intention to do good” test, like what the folks at The Commonwealth Market have built. Did the charity have goals? Did everyone in the organization know what they were? Were they collecting data to measure their progress? Did the data have integrity?

A big “Innovation” button would link to information about how innovative the organization is — how its approach differs from traditional approaches, and what’s different about the way the organization is attacking the problem.

And if you don’t know what charity you want to explore, you can browse by cause. Just the way iTunes introduces you to great artists that you’d never heard of before, we could motivate donors to place really interesting bets on cool organizations that were previously unknown.

Financial data is also featured prominently. It could draw tax information from Guidestar, but instead of rendering it in the form of intimidating charts, it would create 3-D bar graphs and pie charts, beautifully lit, and in the colors of LifeSavers. Maybe the pie charts are actually pictures of, well, pie. So you’d actually want to look at them.

If the charity has also been looked at by an evaluator like Givewell (it does its own research on about 500 charities), Great Nonprofits (it assembles donor feedback), Philanthropedia (it gathers expert opinion on about 200 nonprofits), or Charity Navigator (it has financial information on about 7,000 charities), then that information would be there to look at as well.

Some people will say that the public doesn’t want any of this. They just want a letter-grade — something quick and simple. Ten years ago the public didn’t want MP3 players. Why? Because no one knew what the hell an MP3 player was, and the damned name scared most people to death. An iPod, on the other hand, now that sounds friendly. And it works. People don’t know what they want because no one has shown it to them in an accessible and inspirational way.

How much would this all cost? With an error margin of plus or minus 50%, I’d say about $1.5 billion annually. Assuming a management and general rate of 30% off of that total, $1.03 billion would be left for assessment. This figure suits itself to meaningful investigations. If the agency’s analysts were paid $65,000 annualized ($1,250 weekly, or $31.25 hourly), and assuming 700,000 active charities in the nation, the funds would provide enough resources for about 47 hours, or about six days, of investigation and summary for each charity per year.

$1.5 billion sounds huge. But not when you realize that it represents about one half of one percent of what we donate to charity each year. Then it sounds cheap. Then it sounds like the minimum amount we ought to be spending to monitor and evaluate all of this giving, in a way that’s consistent across the board. Everyone could use the information — individuals, states attorneys general, foundations, the media, other charities — all operating with the same objective baseline data.

It would create such a sea change in public confidence in — and interest in — charities, the increase in giving alone would pay for it many times over.

Sound crazy? Damned right it’s crazy. But not as crazy as it must have sounded when Henry Ford proposed the automobile, with a need to build millions of miles of asphalt road, complete with street lights and traffic lights at every intersection and a million gas stations to fill the cars with fuel. Or as crazy as when Edison said you’d need to run millions of miles of poles and wire all over the country, to every single house, in order to make the light bulb work.

If this all sounds like a dream, then I say it’s time to start doing some serious dreaming.

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